23/12/2023–|Last updated: 12/23/202308:03 PM (Mecca time)
Mohamed Gholam Mohamedou – Adre city on the Sudanese-Chadian border
From the hell of death, burning fires, and spilled blood, to the hell of harsh life and miserable living in these miserable camps.
A hellish journey sums up the fate of hundreds of thousands of Sudanese refugees who were suddenly toppled by the ravages of the night, uprooted from their homes in Darfur, and thrown into a swamp of misery and homelessness in sprawling camps here and there in eastern Chad.
The largest of these camps, and its façade and arch, from which refugees are distributed to the rest of the camps, is the Adre camp, which lacks the most basic conditions of life, such as water, food, health, and education. Hundreds of thousands are crowded into small straw arbors that the refugees built themselves, and whose raw materials they brought from the harsh nature around them.
Extreme suffering
As for daily life and livelihood, it is not without a liver. This Muhammad Qamar Abkar – like others around him – does not find a way to manage his daily living except by buying tree trunks, dividing them into small pieces, and then exchanging them with other refugees for grains of millet or corn, for them to burn in preparing their meals. Modest, causing the atmosphere to be suffocated by rising smoke.
To draw a better picture of the reality of the camp and life in it, we interviewed an official from the African Masalit tribe, which bore the greatest burden and the most long-term damage in this clear affliction.
The head of Adre camp says that the number of temporary “residents” of the camp is more than 300,000 people, and that the number of families flocking to it daily from the city of El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur State, and its environs, reaches 200 families.
He added that there is no education for children, no food, and no medicine in the camp, and that some organizations provide limited health support, especially in emergency cases, childbirth, and treating the spread of malaria.
The picture is from the back
The head of the camp did not accept that his face appeared in the photo, “because all those who testified to international investigators and the International Criminal Court had their relatives killed in Sudan by the Rapid Support,” he said.
He continues that last June alone, more than a thousand wounded people arrived at the camp, most of whom suffered severe fractures, and that many of them did not receive adequate treatment, “because they need to go to Absha or N’Djamena, and they do not have the means for that.”
For his part, the sheikh of the Masalit tribe in the “Muqriniya” region east of El Geneina, the deputy official for the Sudanese refugees in the Adre camp, paints a miserable picture of the conditions here by saying, “There is no shelter here, no hangers (to protect against mosquitoes), no blankets, and no eating plates, and what the program provides The world food (of the United Nations) for those who have obtained refugee cards, including oil, corn, and some other legumes, is not sufficient at all,” he said, noting in this regard that many have not yet obtained these cards.
Tenth of the impossible
He notes that some local organizations sometimes provide refugees with pasta, mattresses, corn, and oil. As for meat, chicken and fish, it is tenth impossible to obtain them here.
He directs his anger at “the Sudanese army and the Sudanese government who did not defend us” and at the Arab governments that did not provide anything to the refugees despite their poverty and need, even though he referred to some private Arab philanthropists who provided limited aid and food baskets.
Locusts are the food of the affluent
A tour of the camp’s “market” reveals the spread of grilled locusts as an item used by the “yuppie” refugees to diversify their daily meals, which are nothing more than corn or millet. A “kora” is used to measure them, which is a small plate. Its price, according to Fatima Khater Ali, is 3,000 Western francs. African CFA, or about $4.
Many here, even those who received cards from the World Food Program, complain about the absence of sugar, and say that they did not get it at all. Some of them correct that they once received food baskets that included a little sugar from two Kuwaiti charities.
Despite the hardship of living here, compared to some other permanent camps, Qamar and many others insist on staying there because of its proximity to the Sudanese border, which is only a few hundred meters away. She says, “Waiting for any news about my children, who have not heard from us after we fled in the midst of the barbaric killings.” Whom the support (relative to the rapid support) practiced against us.”
Geographic distribution
The refugees are distributed and classified from here, where they are sent to other camps, such as the Orange camp, which hosts 50,000 refugees, “Mecca” with around 40,000, and “Alasha”, which is supposed to receive 60,000, according to what was stated by the deputy Sudanese refugee official in the camp. I know.
Cruel nature
Perhaps one of the reasons for the difficulty in getting aid to this remote corner of the Republic of Chad, which is about 1,000 kilometers from the capital, N’Djamena, is, in addition to the will and capabilities, the combination of the insubordinate nature and the faltering development efforts.
For example – along the dangerous, unpaved road that we took from the city of Abesha to Adre – we could see World Food Program trucks and some Chadian charitable organizations that Khairon had sent with some supplies, lying on the side of the road after overturning and their contents scattered here and there, or embedded in The ground, or its tire tires were torn apart by huge jagged rocks.
